where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Does religion have a role in a free society?

Religion isn’t talked about much publicly anymore.  The thinking is that religion is a personal matter.  But even more than that, the thinking is that it doesn’t really matter anyway.  Whatever you want to believe doesn’t matter.  As long as it is your belief and you sincerely hold to that belief, nobody can tell you that you are wrong.  So there is nothing to discuss.  To even think that somebody is wrong in a sincerely held belief is deemed arrogance and a form of hatred.

However, our country was founded on what can be called religious beliefs, though the Founders didn’t call them beliefs.  They called them facts.

They didn’t just believe that God created all people equal, such that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.  It is a fact.

They didn’t just believe that God gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government did not give and that government cannot take away.  No, it’s a fact. 

Now if a person is an atheist, how can they believe that all people have unalienable rights?  Not even every religion believes in that.  Not every religion believes in a right to life or the right to pursue happiness either. 

A religion is an all-encompassing worldview that defines what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what are the rules, are there any rules? 

Every person lives by their personal worldview whether it has the name of a religion or not.  Nations have worldviews too that shape the kinds of laws that it makes.  Our country was founded on the Christian worldview.  That’s why we believe in a right to life and the right to pursue happiness.  And why we don’t have kings but representatives.

The Founders, and the Constitution, believed in a small government.  That presumes that the people are self-reliant, responsible, caring of their fellow citizens, and of a high moral standard.  Our Founders encouraged the use of the Bible in public schools, where it remained for almost 200 years before a court called supreme deemed that unconstitutional. 

Now this doesn’t mean that people are or should be compelled to believe the Bible or even in God.  The right to freedom of speech means that people are free to believe what they want and to talk about it.  But you have that right, because our Founders believed in a worldview where God gave you that right.  And that is Christianity.

You don’t have to believe in Christianity to live in our country and to enjoy our freedoms, but you have those freedoms because our Founders did believe in that.

Some people will insist that our Founders were deists and that these rights were natural law and had nothing to do with the Bible and Christianity.

Except that a deist god wouldn’t give humans anything, let alone tell them about it. 

And natural law is an outworking of philosophy.  Every generation sees new philosophical systems that influence things until the next one comes along.  But the Founders believed, no, affirmed that God gave these rights to human beings.  That’s not philosophy but a statement of fact, undergirded by their belief in the Bible as God’s revelation to humans about Himself and life.

 

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